Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts

Abstract

How should the human body be treated? Should bodies be slaughtered, starved, tortured, sold, and shot in the streets? Whose bodies should be treated in these ways and whose protected from harm? Who has the right to seek redress in cases of abuse and who is seen as fit for dehumanization? This book addresses these very questions, examining materials from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, ancient Near Eastern literature, and contemporary American society. In the first book-length work on personhood in ancient Israel, the author reveals widespread intersections between violence and personhood in both this society and the wider region. Relations of domination and subordination were so important to the culture and social organization of ancient Israel that these relations too often determined the boundaries of personhood itself. Rather than being fixed, personhood was malleable—it could be and was violently erased in many social contexts. The book exposes a violence–personhood–masculinity nexus in which domination allowed those in control to animalize and brutalize the bodies of subordinates. Perhaps even more noteworthy, the author argues that in particular social contexts in the contemporary “Western” world, this same nexus operates, holding devastating consequences for particular social groups. If the violence of Abu Ghraib calls to mind that of Ashurbanipal, this is no accident but is instead because both arise from of a certain construction of personhood that could not exist without violence.